2025 Leadership Gathering

Leading with Humanity: Building a culture of care across our organization.

December 10, 2025

Leadership today isn't just about getting things done. It's about how we show up while doing it. This gathering invited city leaders to reflect on how we lead with empathy, awareness, and intention, while maintaining the high levels of accountability our teams and communities deserve.

After centering 2024 on workload and well-being, this gathering deepened that work moving leaders from managing burnout to actively building cultures where people feel seen, supported, and able to perform at their best.

Why this gathering was needed:

As our workplace continues to evolve, so did the expectations placed on leaders. When leaders prioritize psychological safety, compassion, accountability, and sustainable practices, they don't just support employee well-being they create the conditions for performance, trust, and long-term organizational success. This gathering was about making that connection explicit and giving leaders the mindset and tools to act on it.

What we focused on:

Keynote by Paul, “The Ripples Guy": Leading with Humanity - Reaching Out, Reaching In
- With humor, heart, and practical tools, Paul offered a framework for leading with clarity and care. He explored how leaders can build stronger relationships while sustaining their own resilience through an ever-demanding environment.

The framework: reaching out & reaching in:

Reaching out: Building stronger relationships with our teams. Showing up with intention, connection, and genuine presence.
Reaching in: Sustaining personal resilience. Knowing we well enough to lead others through difficulty without losing ourselves.

Key concepts: the fear zone & the growth zone:

Paul introduced a simple yet powerful concept for understanding how people and teams operate, and how leaders shape which zone their team is living in.

The fear zone: Where we shrink, protect, and avoid. Reactive, guarded, and exhausting.
- Think avoidance, defensiveness, and burnout
The growth zone: Where we stretch, connect, and contribute. Courageous and energizing.
- Think connection, courage, and impact

As leaders, we have a genuine influence on which zone our teams are operating from, often more than we realize. Building a culture of care means creating the conditions for growth to be the default.